Today I released the new and improved MD4.3.8 which addresses a critical performance concern brought on from MD4.3.5 as well as a small series of other bug fixes.

The MD4.3.8 update includes fixes for:

Marketers Delight Theme

Marketers Delight Plugin

Marketers Delight Main Menu

If you have any sites running these 3 tools, be sure to update through the one-click updater system through the Themes/Plugins menu in your WordPress dashboard.

MD Performance Concerns

One thing people love about Marketers Delight is how fast it loads their website. MD was built with minimal resources in mind and does not load any libraries like jQuery that can ultimately have a negative impact on site performance.

After further studying the inner workings of WordPress and MD itself I’ve found some areas where MD falls short in performance and is an area I’d like to greatly improve on for the sake of all of our site’s performance.

I should note that these are all issues that can be covered up by installing a cache plugin, but that doesn’t negate the fact that the issues are still there. Marketers Delight can and will do better on this front in the coming months.

MD4.3.8 starts us on this path by fixing an errant query that could cause your site to load extremely slow, particularly your admin panel, when coupled with an eCommerce plugin like Easy Digital Downloads or WooCommerce (at no fault to these plugins, the issue was in MD).

Alongside fixing this crippling query, MD has also been further optimized to reduce the total number of queries running around your site in general. This update is a great start, but again, there is still plenty of work to be done on this front.

Myself and a couple other MD customers who helped me resolve this issue can already attest to the improvement in site speed from the MD4.3.8 update, so I urge you to update as soon as possible.

Other Fixes in MD4.3.8

Alongside site performance, a few other bugs have been fixed in MD4.3.8 including:

WordPress 4.5 compatibility

Fixed Layout Options meta box on Taxonomies

Fixed bug preventing Page Leads from showing on Taxonomy pages

Fixed bug preventing Main Menu from showing on Taxonomy pages

What’s Next for MD?

After spending a couple of months working on the MD4.3.5 update at the beginning of the month I’ve been in “bug fix” mode ever since. As necessary as bug fixes are, it’s never been my style to simply coast through these small updates and expect to keep you guys happy! I’m looking at the next big thing.

The Kolakube forums are ever-growing as more and more MD users join the community to talk about features and improvements they’d like to see.

From a development standpoint, and I can’t speak too much on this now, I think we can all agree that we’d like to be able to achieve more with Page Leads (here’s the forum discussion thread).

Rather than just creating single call-to-actions per page, Page Leads need to advance into a full-fledged page building system. And after working with enough clients over at Advisor Evolved I can say that I have a great idea of how to approach a system like this without turning MD into “yet another bloated page builder”.

I’ll have more on this later, but I’ve been working on something much bigger with hopes to advance the Kolakube and Marketers Delight brand in a way that makes my mission to you much clearer.

One thing that’s always been unclear about Marketers Delight is, well, what it actually looks like! If you’ve read the sales page you probably noticed a lack of an actual demo of the stock theme.

I’ve been telling everybody that you can just look around the Kolakube website to see MD in action, but this design has been customized, and doesn’t accurately depict what MD looks like when you get your hands on it.

From this need of a demo site, and the smart people I talked to at WordCamp Jacksonville over the weekend, I was able to paint a much clearer picture of how this business should be structured.

I’m currently in the middle of restructuring the Kolakube and Marketers Delight brand to make more sense with hopes MD can market itself better and more on its own.